Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce ...
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Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community.
The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.Less

Education Policy and Racial Biopolitics in Multicultural Cities

Kalervo N. GulsonP. Taylor Webb

Published in print: 2017-07-26

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community.
The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this ...
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Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approaches to philosophy, and the practical and theoretical role of the archive.Less

Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later : The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics

Published in print: 2016-11-08

Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approaches to philosophy, and the practical and theoretical role of the archive.

This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created ...
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This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created between the economic and the political in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal State and the economy.Less

Neoliberal Symptoms : The Impasse between Economics and Politics in Contemporary Political Theory

Anita Chari

Published in print: 2015-10-13

This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created between the economic and the political in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal State and the economy.

Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is ...
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Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.Less

A Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law : From Sovereignty to Normalisation and Beyond

Jacopo Martire

Published in print: 2017-08-01

Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.

The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure ...
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The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Structured as a series of questions and answers regarding the concept of sovereignty, each chapter is organized around a key representational operation performed on a “body” of power increasingly spectacularized, sacralized, de-sacralized, and, above all, troped in various ways: from the analogical relations of Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure, to the autoimmune resistances and allegorical returns they give rise to in Lope's Fuenteovejuna, Calderón's Life is a Dream, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The book's method is comparative and conceptual, linking literary and religious discourse at the level of metaphor, and positing relations between English and Spanish drama, in terms of the “logics” each generates to negotiate the divided terrain of sovereignty. While its tropological approach will be familiar to readers of deconstruction, it also engages with biopolitical, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Legendre, Adriana Cavarero and Walter Benjamin, in order to examine the relationship between early modern theater and power from intersecting theoretical perspectives. The “tears” of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty.Less

The Tears of Sovereignty : Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama

Philip Lorenz

Published in print: 2013-06-26

The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Structured as a series of questions and answers regarding the concept of sovereignty, each chapter is organized around a key representational operation performed on a “body” of power increasingly spectacularized, sacralized, de-sacralized, and, above all, troped in various ways: from the analogical relations of Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure, to the autoimmune resistances and allegorical returns they give rise to in Lope's Fuenteovejuna, Calderón's Life is a Dream, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The book's method is comparative and conceptual, linking literary and religious discourse at the level of metaphor, and positing relations between English and Spanish drama, in terms of the “logics” each generates to negotiate the divided terrain of sovereignty. While its tropological approach will be familiar to readers of deconstruction, it also engages with biopolitical, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Legendre, Adriana Cavarero and Walter Benjamin, in order to examine the relationship between early modern theater and power from intersecting theoretical perspectives. The “tears” of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty.

Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term ...
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Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.Less

The Green State in Africa

Carl Death

Published in print: 2016-09-27

Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.

Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange ...
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Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated—where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature? In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet—Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation. Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.Less

Wildlife in the Anthropocene : Conservation after Nature

Jamie Lorimer

Published in print: 2015-04-01

Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated—where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature? In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet—Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation. Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.

One of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of ...
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One of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics – from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal. Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, and Biopolitics presents a decade of Esposito's thought on the origins and possibilities of political theory. With interlocutors from throughout the western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil and Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon–freedom, democracy, sovereignty, and law–that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, death). Terms of Politics calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms such as community, immunity, biopolitics, and the impersonal in ways that are life affirming rather than life negating. An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.Less

Terms of the Political : Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Roberto Esposito

Published in print: 2012-11-01

One of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics – from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal. Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, and Biopolitics presents a decade of Esposito's thought on the origins and possibilities of political theory. With interlocutors from throughout the western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil and Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon–freedom, democracy, sovereignty, and law–that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, death). Terms of Politics calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms such as community, immunity, biopolitics, and the impersonal in ways that are life affirming rather than life negating. An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.

Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political ...
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Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management. Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience. Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.Less

Counting Species : Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics

Rafi Youatt

Published in print: 2015-02-01

Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management. Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience. Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. ...
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The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, Tarizzo instead envisions a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.Less

Life : A Modern Invention

Davide Tarizzo

Published in print: 2017-11-23

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, Tarizzo instead envisions a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.